Chapter 36
Ben
Iwalk the fence around the horse pasture.
The light’s gone gold and low over the ridge.
It’s still warm on the open grass out here.
Behind me, the air has already started giving up its warmth for the night.
The fence is solid. Nothing to log. Finish the loop, get back before Harper starts dinner without me, and that’s the evening.
Then I look at the horses - bunched at the far end.
All of them, tight together against the north rail, when they should be spread out over the grass working through the last hour of light.
Their ears are pinned toward the treeline.
The gray mare stamps twice and goes still.
I cross the pasture to check that side. The fence over there is as sound as the rest. Nothing on the air, no scent that shouldn’t be here, nothing moving in the trees that I can pick out.
In August, with the graze this good lower down, nothing bothers coming off that ridge at all.
Whatever they’ve got their ears on, it’s their business and not mine.
I’ll mention it to Dane in the morning. I turn back to finish the loop when light gathers between two pines ahead of me.
It’s too steady for the last of a sunset and too gold for anything at this hour.
It holds where it is instead of moving. My hand goes to the knife on my belt.
The light settles and a man stands in it, wings folded back, fair skin with warmth under it, hair in a loose gather of gold. I know that face, I stood in front of it at the top of the Ascent with nothing left in me. It told me her soul comes back. It told me not to waste what I was paying for.
“Samuel.”
“Ben.”
I plant my feet at the edge of the pasture. “Is this it? Is the debt due?”
“It is.”
“Then make it quick. And leave Harper out of it.” I keep my eyes on him. “Whatever gets taken comes off me. That was the arrangement. She stays clear of it.”
He looks at me a while. “Nothing is being taken from you,” he says. “Not the kind of thing you’re braced for.”
“Skip whatever’s meant to make this easier and name the price.” I don’t soften it. “I’ve had months of nights since the Ascent putting together every version of what you people might come for. Say it. I’d rather have it than keep guessing at it.”
“There’s no soul-taking in this. No injury, nothing physical waiting for you at all.”
I’d rather it were physical. I set my feet and wait for the rest of it.
“The price is understanding,” he says. “And it starts a long way back from your own life.”
“Then start.”
“Before there was a wolf or vampire, dragon, fae or angel,” he says, “there was one people. One kind of creature, and every one of them carried all of it at once. The same body took a wolf’s shape, lived on blood, put up wings and breathed fire, healed a wound by laying a hand on it, stepped from one world into the next.
None of it was divided up. Everything any of you can do now, one of them could do in a single afternoon. ”
I stand there in the grass with a knife on my belt and a fence to finish.
“What does ancient history have to do with a debt I agreed to in your chamber?”
“That one nature went to war with itself.” He says it calmly, the same way he’s said the rest. “It came close enough to finishing the job that the ones who lived through it never wanted anything like it standing again. When it ended, the survivors were sealed away. What was left of that single nature got divided up, the pieces scattered into new worlds, separate ones, sealed off from each other.”
He waits. “Drakoria. Doria. Blood Moon. Every realm you have a name for. Each one is a piece of the same thing.”
“There’s more,” he says. “Everyone carried into those new worlds had the memory of ever being one thing stripped out of them. The record of what was done got buried where nobody would find it. Every court, every throne standing today was built on top of that, by people who had no idea what they were standing on.”
“None of that is something I can do anything about.”
“There’s a piece of that old work still running,” he says. “An instinct bred into an entire vampire bloodline to keep it from ever reaching outside itself. Every vampire alive carries it. Every one of them believes it’s their own good sense.”
I start working out how I’m going to tell Dane - tonight, not in the morning. Get it in front of him, Callum and Nova so it stops being a man standing in a field at dusk and turns into work we can do.
“You’re trying to make this something you can prepare the pack against,” Samuel says.
“That’s my job.”
“It’s bigger than anything you can ready them for.”
He comes a step closer to the fence. “The people who did all of this built locks to hold it in place,” he says. “Death was one of them.”
I look up at that. “In the world before, death worked differently. It came and went. It was never permanent, not the version you’ve lived with your entire life. They made it permanent on purpose when they built the new order. One more lock, holding the pieces where they’d been put.”
He lets that sit. “When the Council gave Harper her soul back,” he says, “we broke it.”
I set my hand on the top rail.
“Breaking one of them weakens every other one at once,” he says. “Faelan has spent centuries hunting for an opening like that. He knew the moment it happened. He has been working the crack wider ever since. He’s close enough now that this can’t wait for a better night.”
“What does any of that have to do with me?”
“It was never a private bargain for one life,” Samuel says. “Your love wasn’t useful to us in some general way, Ben. It was the specific thing that crack required. Love willing to break itself completely.”
“You’re telling me you needed it.”
“We needed to know it existed. The only way to know was to make you prove it.”
The sun’s gone from the ridge.
“The Ascent was built hard,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Built that hard on purpose.”
“Yes.” He holds my eyes. “Tuned to take everything from anyone who tried it, so that nothing except the real thing would survive the climb. We had to be certain it was in you. The only way to find out was to let it come very near to killing you.”
I take a step back and there’s nowhere to go. The fence stops me. “So I paid a debt the world owed,” I say. “And nobody told me that’s what I was doing.”
“Yes.”
“I’d do it again.” My voice comes out rough. “Getting her back was worth anything you could have taken. I don’t understand why hearing this is doing what it’s doing to me.”
“That’s the exact point,” he says. “Being willing to pay a price and being handed one you were never told about are two different things. They stay different even when the answer would have been yes either way.”
The horses have gone quiet at the far rail.
“Then why let me climb it?” I ask it straight. “You knew what it would break. You knew what breaking it would do to every realm. You had a choice about that. I didn’t.”
Samuel takes his time. “Because leaving that truth buried forever would have taken something just as real,” he says. “From every realm. Knowing that, we wouldn’t have stopped you.” He holds it. “Not then. Not now.”
I go still, the same stillness Sasha used to catch on me for the better part of a year after Maelik’s compound, when she’d come into a room and find me sitting exactly where she’d left me an hour before. She’d say my name twice before I answered her.
What he’s taken isn’t my life. It’s the belief that fighting for Harper was ever mine to choose.
I built the last part of my life on standing up in that chamber and putting myself on the table for her.
They already knew what I’d say before I said it.
I push off the fence and turn toward the treeline.
That’s where I used to go. Hours at a time, before her, when there were things I couldn’t say out loud to anyone.
Samuel stays where he is at the pasture’s edge and lets me walk.
Six steps into the grass the bond hauls at my chest. It pulls hard, backwards, which only happens when she’s already moving.
Then her voice comes across the open field.
“Ben.”
I turn around before I’ve gone another step. Harper’s most of the way across the pasture at a near run with one hand clamped over her inner wrist.
“It went hot,” she says when she reaches me. “No warning. It’s still going. Ben, it’s sharp, it’s never done that.”
My hand covers hers over the mark before I’ve decided to reach for it.
Her skin is hot enough for me to feel through both our hands.
He’s working it wider tonight. That’s what Samuel said.
It’s standing in front of me now, her heart beating under my palm, because the crack he’s pulling at and the mark on her wrist are the same thing.
I take her hand from her wrist and hold it in mine instead.
“Listen,” I say. “To all of it” and I give it to her start to finish, the same way he gave it to me.
Then the rest. “They needed love willing to break itself,” I say. “That’s what the Ascent was for. It was built to take everything so they’d know the real thing was in me before they spent it. I wasn’t buying you back, Harper. I was paying off something the whole world owed and nobody told me.”
She doesn’t let go of my hand but when I’m finished she stands there for a moment. “Benji.” She waits until I look at her. “What you feel for me is real, it was real long before any of them needed it to be. It was real every day after. None of what they did with it belongs to them.”
“They used it.”
“They used it. They never made it.” Her mouth eases out of the line it’s been in since she got here. “You climbed that thing for me. Whatever they knew, you’re the one who climbed it. That part is yours and I’m keeping it.”
Samuel is still at the pasture’s edge. “The debt is settled,” he says. “Nothing further will be asked of you for it.”
“That’s it?” I ask.
“That’s it.” He looks at the two of us for a moment longer. Then his voice drops. “Nyxiana is my granddaughter. She’s learning the other half of this tonight, in her own realm, in her own way.”
His wings open. The light gathers in around him the same way it did when he arrived. Then the pasture is darker than it was and there’s only the two of us standing in it. She stays exactly where she is while my breathing comes back down. Neither of us says anything. Her hand stays in mine.
“I had it worked out,” I tell her. “I’d braced for something physical. Pain. A scar. Something taken from me that I could look at with the knowledge that it was over.”
“And instead?”
“Instead they took the part where fighting for you was mine.” My voice comes out low. “I never knew that was still on the table.”
Her thumb moves once across my knuckles. “Dane needs to hear this tonight,” she says. “Not in the morning. All of it, the old history included. If that crack is opening like he described, this pack is standing a lot closer to it than anybody’s told them.”
“Agreed.”
“And Benji.” She waits until I look at her again. “You’re telling him with me standing there. Not on your own in his office at midnight.”
“All right.”
We start back across the grass toward the lodge.
At the north rail the horses have settled, gone back to the grass with their heads down, only one is still watching the trees.
I’ll tell Dane about that too, along with the bond hauling backward before she ever called my name, and a mark going hot on my mate’s wrist for a reason nobody can explain yet.
The windows of the lodge are lit. We go in together.